Linux – increase disk size – use LVM or not

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)

Every time you perform an operation with LVM, by default, the previous metadata is archived in /etc/lvm/archive. You can use vgcfgrestore to restore it, or grab the extends by hand (harder, but lvcreate(8) should cover it).

Edit:

And to make it as easy as possible, I should add that you can find the last backup before your destructive operation by looking at descriptions:

# grep description /etc/lvm/archive/vg01_*
/etc/lvm/archive/vg01_00001.vg:description = "Created before executing 'lvremove -f /dev/vg01/foo'"
/etc/lvm/archive/vg01_00002.vg:description = "Created before executing 'lvremove -f /dev/vg01/bar'"
/etc/lvm/archive/vg01_00003.vg:description = "Created before executing 'lvremove -f /dev/vg01/baz'"

Edit:

The normal allocation policy (default one) will allocate a stripe from the first free PE when there is enough room to do so. If you want to confirm where the LV was allocated, you can look in the archive files, those are perfectly readable by humans.